For planning a new mobile telecommunication network or for expanding an already existing mobile telecommunication network, there are inter alia two important goals which however compete with each other. A first goal is an optimization of the spatial coverage of the telecommunication network. In order to achieve this goal one would like to increase the transmitting power of all base stations of the telecommunication network. The second goal is a low overall power consumption. In order to decrease the overall power consumption one would like to reduce the transmitting power of at least some base stations of the telecommunication network.
Planning or expanding a mobile telecommunication network is typically done offline by means of so called network planning tools. Those tools rely on the geographical data of the various network elements and evaluate the spatial coverage of the whole telecommunication network.
For planning and/or for configuring a telecommunication network one has to distinguish between (a) interference limited cells and (b) coverage limited cells.
Interference limited cells typically feature small inter site distances, high transmitting power and/or a small penetration loss. Interference limited cells do typically not have a coverage problem, the performance is limited by the interference of neighboring cells and not by thermal noise. Therefore, in order to provide for good radio conditions within neighboring cells the base stations serving these neighboring cells have to be considerate with respect to each other in order to reduce inter cell interference effects.
In highly interference limited cells, one could typically reduce the transmitting power of all base stations in a certain neighborhood without affecting the performance respectively the average cell data throughput. It is important to understand, that in this case the received signal strengths are significantly above thermal noise for all user equipments being connected to a particular base station.
Coverage limited cells have coverage holes or are at least close to having such coverage holes. The received signal strengths of weak user equipments are in the range of or even below the thermal noise. In this respect weak user equipments are mobile terminals, which have a poor radio connection with their serving base station. A poor radio connection may occur in particular at the cell edge or in shadowing holes for instance behind large buildings.
A coverage optimization may be necessary for instance because of different reasons such as a cell/base station failure, changing environments (e.g. a construction of a new building), a too aggressive minimization of the transmitting power of a base station and/or a too aggressive load balancing between neighboring cells.
In order to find a suitable tradeoff between (a) a small energy consumption (achievable with low transmitting powers) and (b) a good cell coverage (achievable with small transmitting powers) one has to configure the base stations of a telecommunication network in an appropriate and coordinated manner. In particular, one has to make sure that the base stations transmit their signals in the downlink direction with a suitable transmitting power.
There may be a need for providing an effective and reliable method for determining an optimized configuration of a telecommunication network. Further, there may be a need for providing network elements which are adapted to carry out such a method.